By Paul Chesser in the American Spectator

A global warming alarmist group that masqueraded for the last few years as an objective consultant for many states announced this week that it has been disowned by its global warming alarmist parents . Not that that will change anything.

The Center for Climate Strategies, whose failed track record spreads beyond the warming mythology, announced its separation last week from the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. For a long time CCS hawkers Tom Peterson and Ken Colburn (video), while promoting their climate environoia (video), hid their bond with PEC. Now they say they were related all along.

To recap, here’s how this scheme was birthed. Years ago PEC, which says it is “a catalyst for legislative, regulatory and policy change by public and private decision-makers to advance solutions that are in the best environmental and economic interests of the Commonwealth,” decided to export its activism outside Pennsylvania. It created Enterprising Environmental Solutions (why has its website been taken down?), which housed CCS, with the goal (PDF of their tax return) of “form(ing) EESI to carry out their non-regulatory agenda,” as “EESI has their own board of directors and is controlled by PEC, since PEC is the only member of EESI.” Despite this clear statement, CCS’s executive director Peterson said, “(EESI) does not have an advocacy mission, and it doesn’t have an advocacy history.”

A bit of alphabet soup, but the gist is that Peterson disavowed CCS’s IRS-granted purpose. He also apparently hid the center’s agenda from the states it sought business from. Peterson, his lieutenant Colburn, and CCS have zipped around the country to pitch (mostly) governors (or their administrations) on this premise, in my own paraphrasing:

There is a human-caused global warming crisis and the states must do something about it, because the federal government is not. We ask the governor to issue an executive order that confirms this crisis and creates a commission to study greenhouse gas emissions—but call it a “climate commission.” Appoint members who buy into the anthropogenic global warming crisis, and include some representatives from utilities and business, but not too many or they might screw things up. Once you hire CCS, we will take care of everything for you from then on: run the meetings, set the agendas, write the meeting minutes, provide technical analysis, maintain the website, and establish the voting rules. Oh, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other global warming alarmist foundations have provided the funding for our work, so don’t you worry! Just let CCS do its thing.

While Peterson and Colburn have been far from transparent about their origins (they also hide how much they get paid), the work CCS does has also been thoroughly discredited. They forbade any debate or discussion about global warming science. As they wooed states out of as much money as they could (not much, it turns out) to reduce the burden on their subsidizers—mainly the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—they peddled incompetent economics (Green jobs! Cost savings!) in every state where they worked. They could not produce analysis in any state that showed the effect their policy recommendations would have upon climate—ostensibly the purpose for their state commissions. And besides their disregard for recent observed climatological trends, they continue to promote obsolete technologies like biofuels, which recent studies show have increased greenhouse gas emissions rather than reduced them.

Read more on how this group has caused many of the states to further endanger their future economic recovery here. See also this Paul Chesser story on the CCS PEC connection here.

Posted by Marc Morano, EPW

Scientists at the UK Met office “launched a blistering attack on scientific colleagues and journalists who exaggerate the effects of global warming.” The Met office, “one of the most prestigious research facilities in the world” according to the February 11, 2009, article in the UK Guardian, is no hotbed of climate skeptics, as the organization accepts the UN IPCC view of man-made global warming. A U.S. climate expert has also declared that “the political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing,” and a U.S. Naval Academy chemist has accused the media of “journalistic malpractice” for hyping warming fears. Furthermore, NASA’s James Hansen and RealClimate.org have also come under renewed criticism. 

The scientists at the UK Met Office lamented the “recent ‘apocalyptic predictions’ about Arctic ice melt,” according to the UK Guardian newspaper. Dr. Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, warned that “there is little evidence to support claims that Arctic ice has reached a tipping point and could disappear within a decade or so,” according to the UK Guardian. “The record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather, with summer ice increasing again over the next few years,” Pope explained.

Pope’s Arctic ice view echoes the 2008 U.S. Senate Minority Report on Arctic sea ice and polar bears. The January 20, 2008, report featured “the latest peer-reviewed science detailing the natural causes of recent Arctic ice changes.”

Climate researcher Dr. Peter Stott echoed Pope, warning that “dramatic predictions of accelerating temperature rise and sea ice decline, based on a few readings, could backfire when natural variability swings the other way and the trends seem to reverse,” the paper reported. “It just confuses people,” Stott added. Despite these attacks on their fellow scientists and the media, both Pope and Stott continue to believe that man-made global warming is real and should be addressed, in contrast to a growing number of scientists who now believe ”the ­science has, quite simply, gone awry.”

Senator James Inhofe, the Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee forewarned of the same situation back in 2006. “Yes—it appears that alarmism has led to skepticism,” then EPW chairman Inhofe said in a floor speech on September 25, 2006. 

‘Climate policy collapsing’

This latest warning about global warming alarmism follows the declaration that ”the political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing” by University of Colorado Professor Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. on February 7, 2009. 
Pielke, Jr., accepts the UN IPCC view of global warming, bluntly called the current carbon trading based policy proposals to address man-made global warming “fictional and fantasy.”

“The political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing. If you are not aware of this fact you will be very soon,” Pielke, Jr., who is in the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at University of Colorado, wrote.

Read much more here.

Update: One Meteorologist inspired by Dr. Gray’s statement below cancelled his AMS membership (not the only one) . See his note to me and the AMS response here. See in this essay by Richard Lindzen how the professional societies have been infiltrated and are now controlled by environmental extremists and opportunists with a political motive and have abandoned objective science. Earlier, I had posted a story on how the professional societies had strayed towards advocacy here.

By Dr. William Gray

I am appalled at the selection of James Hansen as this year’s recipient of the AMS’s highest award - the Rossby Research Medal.  James Hansen has not been trained as a meteorologist.  His formal education has been in astronomy.  His long records of faulty global climate predictions and alarmist public pronouncements have become increasingly hollow and at odds with reality.  Hansen has exploited the general public’s lack of knowledge of how the globe’s climate system functions for his own benefit.  His global warming predictions, going back to 1988 are not being verified.  Why have we allowed him go on for all these years with his faulty and alarmist prognostications?  And why would the AMS give him its highest award?

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) was founded in 1919 as an organization dedicated to advancing scientific knowledge of weather and climate.  It has been a wonderful beacon for fostering new understanding of how the atmosphere and oceans function.  But this strong positive image is now becoming tarnished as a result of the AMS leadership’s capitulating to the lobby of the climate modelers and to the outside environmental and political pressure groups who wish to use the now AMS position on AGW to help justify the promotion of their own special interests.  The effectiveness of the AMS as an objective scientific organization has been greatly compromised.

We AMS members have allowed a small group of AMS administrators, climate modelers, and CO2 warming sympathizers to maneuver the internal workings of our society to support AGW policies irrespective of what our rank-and-file members might think.  This small organized group of AGW sympathizers has indeed hijacked our society.

Debate.  The AMS is the most relevant of our country’s scientific societies as regards to its members having the most extensive scientific and technical background in meteorology and climate.  It should have been a leader in helping to adjudicate the claims of the AGW advocates and their skeptical critics.  Our country’s Anglo-Saxon derived legal system is based on the idea that the best way to get to the truth is to have opposite sides of a continuous issue present their differing views in open debate before a non partisan jury.  Nothing like this has happened with regards to the AGW issue.  Instead of organizing meetings with free and open debates on the basic physics and the likelihood of AGW induced climate changes, the leaders of the society (with the backing of the society’s AGW enthusiasts) have chosen to fully trust the climate models and deliberately avoid open debate on this issue.  I know of no AMS sponsored conference where the AGW hypothesis has been given open and free discussion.  For a long time I have wanted a forum to express my skepticism of the AGW hypothesis.  No such opportunities ever came within the AMS framework.  Attempts at publication of my skeptic views have been difficult.  One rejection stated that I was too far out of the mainstream thinking.  Another that my ideas had already been discredited.  A number of AGW skeptics have told me they have had similar experiences. 

The climate modelers and their supporters deny the need for open debate of the AGW question on the grounds that the issue has already been settled by their model results.  They have taken this view because they know that the physics within their models and the long range of their forecast periods will likely not to be able to withstand knowledgeable and impartial review (see Appendix).  They simply will not debate the issue.  As a defense against criticism they have resorted to a general denigration of those of us who do not support their AGW hypothesis.  AGW skeptics are sometimes tagged (I have been) as no longer being credible scientists.  Skeptics are often denounced as tools of the fossil-fuel industry.  A type of McCarthyism against AGW skeptics has been in display for a number of years.

Recent AMS Awardees.  Since 2000 the AMS has awarded its annual highest award (Rossby Research Medal) to the following AGW advocates or AGW sympathizers; Susan Solomon (00), V. Ramanathan (02), Peter Webster (04), Jagadish Shukla (05), Kerry Emanuel (07), Isaac Held (08) and James Hansen (09).  Its second highest award (Charney Award) has gone to AGW warming advocates or sympathizers; Kevin Trenberth (00), Rich Rotunno (04), Robert D. Cess (06), Allan Betts (07), Gerald North (08) and Warren Washington and Gerald Meehl (09).  And the other Rossby and Charney awardees during this period are not known to be critics of the AGW warming hypothesis. Read much on this issue here. See his scientific appendix Part A here and Part B here.